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Pynchon’s Symbolism

Thomas Pynchons powerfully symbolic language gets us beneath the rhetoric of our
pretensions
By Rick Moody

THE novelist Robert Coover, speaking of influences in American fiction, once remarked
that apprentices of his generation found themselves (in the 1950s) grappling with two
very different models of what the novel might be. One, Coover said, was Saul Bellow's
realistic if picaresque Adventures of Augie March; the other was William Gaddis's
encyclopedic Recognitions. Writers my age (mid-thirties), however, don't have the luxury
of a choice. Our problem is how to confront the influence of a single novelist: Thomas
Pynchon.

Despite the reputation of Pynchon's magnum opus, Gravity's Rainbow (1973), many of
my contemporaries came to him through his earlier work. His first novel, V. (1963), is
mostly concerned with the search by one Herbert Stencil for a woman -- or place, or
concept -- referred to in his father's journals simply by this initial. The action of the novel
-- which also takes up Stencil's father, a network of European spies, and a Whole Sick
Crew of American Navy wastrels -- goes as far afield as turn-of-the-century Egypt,
southwest Africa during the First World War, and Malta after the Second World War,
dealing along the way with contemporary Americana up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
V.is ripe with the kind of dense, symbolic imagery we associate with poets -- with T. S.
Eliot and Wallace Stevens (Gravity's Rainbow likewise caroms off Rilke and Dickinson)
-- and with the loose, improvisatory language of beat writing. It is by turns hilarious,
slow, and utterly mesmerizing.

Portions of V. cannibalize the author's student work, particularly the two stories "Low-
lands" and "Under the Rose." (Pynchon's later novel Vineland, published in 1990, opens
dramatically -- with a character leaping through a storefront window -- in an image lifted
from V.: "Here [was] one potential berserk studying the best technique for jumping
through a plate glass window.") Repetitions haunt the entire oeuvre, so much so that
Pynchon's work seems to exhibit a sort of "conceptual continuity," as the composer Frank
Zappa named it, wherein each work builds on thematic and formal innovations -- and
even the raw material -- of prior efforts.

Another example: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Pynchon's masterpiece in miniature, like
V. takes as its form a search. In Lot 49 the quester is a woman with the unlikely name of
Oedipa Maas, who, engaged as executrix for the estate of Pierce Inverarity, a Hearstlike
tycoon, inadvertently begins to uncover an international postal conspiracy dating back to
Europe in the Middle Ages. Like V., Oedipa's story is rich with symbolism and leitmotif,
in an armature often having to do with an idea practically trademarked by Pynchon:
entropy, or the tendency of closed energy systems to move toward disorder. Again this is
a borrowing from an early story by the author ("Entropy"); and it is reprised, in Gravity's
Rainbow.
Whereas Pynchon's early novels are accessible, or at least crystalline enough to permit
readers to follow them to their ambiguous conclusions, Gravity's Rainbow confounds
readerly expectations utterly. The surrealism -- the eruptions of odd, unforeseeable events
and voices; the doublings, triplings, halvings, and quarterings of characters; the chance
procedures -- that occasionally colors prior novels emerges in GR as the dominant
strategy. Pynchon's controlled third-person-limited point of view in Lot 49 becomes the
fractal omniscience of GR. Primarily the narrative of Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London
during the Second World War who has the ability to predict imminent German bombing
trajectories by erection, GR deals tangentially with hundreds of other important
characters, with Russians, Germans, Africans, and Central Asians, and with settings such
as Colonial America, turn-of-the-century Africa, and the United States of the early
seventies before it dispatches Slothrop entirely, casting his fragmentary consciousness
around the remainder of the book. (He fails to appear recognizably in the last fifty pages.)

What accounts for the perpetual hold Gravity's Rainbow has on the consciousness of
American writers and critics? What accounts for the myth that has sprung up around it --
a myth that seems to have ensnared even the facts of the author's life, or, at least, our idea
of those facts? What makes GR so crucial to the voyage of younger American writers? I'd
contend that it's Pynchon's style, not his subject. Whereas the prose in V., Lot 49, and the
early stories is occasionally inventive and arrestingly lyrical ("For it was now like
walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above,
hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the
hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth"), in
GR it is more than dazzling -- it's uncanny. It discards the usual limits on English and
American prose. In fact, the writing -- notwithstanding the physics and hard science in a
novel often fascinated with the intricacies of ordnance technologies -- seems to me the
point of GR, its motivating force, especially as this language elucidates Pynchon's febrile
imagination. Take, for example, the stunning opening page, with its nightmarish
evocation of the London Blitz.

They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of the main station, out of downtown,
and begin pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city. Is this the way out?
Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No, this
is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into -- they go in under
archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass
... and it is poorer the deeper they go ... ruinous secret cities of poor, places whose names
he has never heard.

American research libraries swell with monographs interpreting Gravity's Rainbow, and
many of these monographs are taken up with the arcana of the novel -- the physics, the
statistics, the theory, the citations (of Max Weber, of Gioacchino Rossini, of Pavlov). But
if GR were merely literature of ideas (in the limited sense that Nabokov so often decried),
we would think no more of this work than we do of Philip K. Dick's engaging science
fictions. Pynchon's accomplishment is that he has found the perfect marriage of form and
language for his rendering of Western consciousness.
The Reagan-Bush years saw Pynchon's output dwindle. Other than the introduction to his
volume of apprentice stories, Slow Learner (1984), Pynchon published nothing new
during the eighties. However, his next novel, Vineland, an anti-canonical comic romp, is
set during that time of substance abuse and leveraged buyouts. Largely dismissed by
tenured Pynchonians when it was first published, Vineland now seems to have been
underrated. Its narrative -- of the California student movements in the sixties, and of
Frenesi Gates, a student filmmaker turned FBI informant and delinquent hippie mom -- is
both funny ("The secret to Spinach Casserole was the UBI, or Universal Binding
Ingredient, cream of mushroom soup") and sympathetic in ways that are rare in the
Pynchon canon. Its language, rather than its science and philosophy, is uppermost in the
mind of the reader (though there are of course passages of Pynchonian erudition, as in the
material on union organizing during the thirties), and this language is controlled --
without the occasional awkwardnesses of the early work -- and engaging.

WHICH brings us to Mason & Dixon. If you accept the rumor-mongering on the World
Wide Web and elsewhere, the author has been at work on this particular monster for more
than a decade. This is easy to believe. At nearly 800 pages, Mason & Dixon is obviously
meant to quash the idea that Gravity's Rainbow was some sort of fantastic lucky break. It
is self-consciously intent on dealing with American literature on the most ambitious scale
imaginable. And it succeeds magnificently.

The first electrifying difference about M&D is the astonishing voice of its narration.
Pynchon has elected to write his new novel in an eighteenth-century English idiom. To
say this is risky is to understate, and yet the voice here is not only elegiac and credible
but also powerfully moving and unexpected, especially given the very contemporary
language of the Pynchon novels that have preceded it.

Eighteenth-century prose is the style because this is a historical novel about the famous
surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon -- mappers of the border between
Pennsylvania and Maryland that also made up part of the dividing line between slave
states and free states before the Civil War, and globetrotters on a variety of scientific
adventures in the later 1700s. More than simply a period voice telling a tall tale of these
two anti-heroes, however, the narration is largely the first-person voice of a singular
character, the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, who tells most of the story of M&D after
dinner, for the entertainment of his family. Thus we have an oral narrative, like Conrad's
Heart of Darkness -- the first such in Pynchon's output, and a form that recalls an earlier
time in the development of the novel. (As far as conceptual continuity is concerned, the
Reverend Cherrycoke seems to be related to a minor character from GR, a psychic called
Ronald Cherrycoke -- and this perhaps accounts for the Reverend's ability to relate events
at which he was not present.)

The action of Mason & Dixon is refreshingly linear, compared with the complexity of
Pynchon's earlier work. Since it's shaped by the needs of Cherrycoke's folktale (he was a
member of two Mason and Dixon expeditions and bases his yarn on inside knowledge), it
provides many of the elements of a good story: romance, Indian attack, and so forth. The
tale opens with Mason and Dixon meeting in about 1760 to embark, at the behest of the
British Royal Society, on a journey to the Southern Hemisphere to observe the Transit of
Venus -- the passage of that planet across the sun. Just as they set sail from England,
however, they are attacked by a French frigate and several of the crew members are
killed. This episode, which comes only thirty pages into the book, sets the tone for the
story to follow -- Action! Incident! Naval battle! I want to be clear on this point: Mason
& Dixon is a page-turner.

After beseeching the Royal Society to allow them to abandon their sea passage (the
society responds by threatening them with legal action), the pair proceed to Cape Town,
South Africa, to observe the Transit, in a portion of the book's opening section ("Latitudes
and Departures") that is luminously rendered, replete with the slave culture of the Dutch
colonies in South Africa and liaisons between the astronomers -- Dixon, whose sunny
romantic nature is in stark contrast to the gothic-melancholic Mason, is elsewhere more
often the culprit, but here Mason gets into the act -- and various women of the Cape.
After the Transit, Mason sails for St. Helena, in the south Atlantic, to take further
observations with a Royal Society chronometer. "Latitudes and Departures" winds down
with Mason and Dixon back in England, in disquisition mainly upon family history and
British calendar reform.

In accepting a commission to survey the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland,


Mason, the expedition's leader, retreats from the hard science of the Transit of Venus (a
retreat made more poignant by his failure to be elected to the Royal Society), and the
book returns to the virtuosic patch of analytic and geophysical writing that colors the first
250 pages (though an abundance of detail and arcana remains for hard-core Pynchon
decoders), such that the section called "America" begins to indulge in the metaphysical,
moral, and political struggles of the New World. For example, Mason and Dixon land
first in Philadelphia, and Benjamin Franklin is among their initial acquaintances: "The
Geometers have encounter'd the eminent Philadelphian quite by chance, in the pungent
and dim back reaches of an Apothecary in Locust-Street" (wherein Dixon is about to buy
a wagonload of laudanum for their journey). Franklin is of course given to quips:
"'Strangers, heed my wise advice, -- Never pay the Retail Price.'" Not long after, George
Washington is their host in Virginia: "If the Colonel serves not as a Focus of Sobriety,
neither is he quite the incompetent Fool depicted in the London press."

PYNCHON'S preoccupation with conspiracy is well documented. It haunts all the books,
from Lot 49, with its postal conspiracy, to Vineland, with its FBI infiltration of the
student movement, and it gets ample play in Mason & Dixon as well. Initially, during the
Transit of Venus expedition, the conspiracy resides in the East India Company, in whose
pocket (by relation) Mason finds Nevil Maskelyne, the future Astronomer Royal, who
perhaps thwarts Mason's election to the Royal Society. On the shores of America the
surveyors find a sinister new force at work: the Jesuits. Yep, the Society of Jesus, which
invented its own "Telegraph," tried to wipe out the Chinese practice of fêng shui, founded
a libertine community of nuns in Quebec called the Widows of Christ, and bankrolled a
group of "Jesuits on horseback, in black riding-Habits with divided Skirts," who patrol
the streets of Canada reinforcing doctrine, decorated in their fiendish insignia: an upside-
down five-pointed star.

Against this backdrop of conspiracies political and religious, Mason and Dixon retreat
into the wilderness, into a kind of folkloric and parabolic warp, among a coterie of axmen
and Indian guides and Presbyterian assistants. They move first south and then west,
surveying the boundary line and its tangents, and as they go, the Enlightenment replaces
the Gothic and Renaissance wisdom of Western culture, with Mason and Dixon moving
in and through and around the Enlightenment's articulations. As Cherrycoke puts it,
As God has receded, as Deism has crept in to make the best of this progressive Absence,
more and more do we witness extreme varieties of human character emergent ...
Illuminati, Freemasons, Elect Cohens, many of whom, to my great curiosity, have found
their way into Pennsylvania.
This is the America that Mason and Dixon voyage into, and it is where they encounter,
among others, the Redzingerites, whose "view of Baptism does not, need I say, stop at
Total Immersion"; and, during winter layovers in New York, the Sons of Liberty, bent on
overthrowing the British oppressors; and the Sadean inhabitants of Lepton Castle; and
Professor Voam and his pet electric eel; and Armand Allègre, France's greatest living
chef, who has come to the Colonies to try to escape the amorous attentions of a
"mechanickal Duck" created by the immortal French scientist Jacques de Vaucanson; and
Zepho Beck, who metamorphoses during the full moon into a giant beaver; and Captain
Zhang, a fêng shui master and refugee from the Jesuit conspiracy; and perpetrators of
Indian massacre (in Lancaster, Pennsylvania) and rebellion and backwoods barbarism.
Along the way there is of course the work to do, in which chain lengths are extended,
sometimes through the middle of properties, on one occasion right through a house (with
the inhabitants arguing over which state to reside in), and trees are felled, and a broad
swath of civilized clearing is extended into the pristine continent.

If the action sounds picaresque, that's because it is. The 450 middle pages of Mason &
Dixon most resemble the great picaresque novels of Fielding or the metaphysical comedy
of Voltaire's Candide. What makes M&D modern (besides uncanny similarities between
the Enlightenment and the millennium, besides sly references to contemporary culture --
to dope smoking, to popular music: "'Is it not the very Rhythm of the Engines, ... the
Rock of the Oceans, the Roll of the drums in the Night'") is the tremendous intellection
spun into its episodic action: Charles Mason's ambition (which is matched only by
Dixon's refusal to be ambitious at all, except in womanizing, drinking, and fishing) is to
understand the invisible forces behind the physical laws that make up his work during the
Enlightenment. Like Vineland, in which scarcely a character escapes without being
described as a ghost, and like GR, with its cast of revenants, Mason & Dixon dwells
frequently on what is hidden. At times this absence seems to refer to the astrophysics of
the twentieth century ("'Time is the Space that may not be seen'") -- out of reach for
Mason and Dixon, and yet implied in their endeavors; at times it refers to the divine
("Surely, at the end of the day, we serve no master but Him that regulates the movements
of the Heav'ns, which taken together form a cryptick Message," Mason says), and
therefore to the degraded aspect of deism during the Enlightenment. At times what's
hidden in M&D is the hibernating bear of Colonial politics ("Does Britannia, when she
sleeps, dream? Is America her dream? -- in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan
Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and
on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority
of Mankind, seen"). Whatever the identity of this hidden force, it leaves its mark on the
book, and on us, in an M&D refrain: "As above, so below."

Mason and Dixon complete their line in 1767, and spend much of the following year
surveying a degree of latitude also contracted to them by the Royal Society. The novel
provides two separate and completely opposed endings to this section of the book. In the
first ending the surveyors are unable to cross the Native American Warrior Path, west of
the Alleghenies (the path is patrolled by the violent Delaware and Shawnee tribes), and so
turn back toward civilization. In the second (false) ending they continue for a while west,
into the dusk, into the herds of buffalo, into the prairie, away from the civilization of the
Enlightenment. This ending is an example of the kind of dream logic that overtakes the
book in the wilderness (in this regard Cherrycoke frequently likens his tale to the works
of the great Baron Munchausen); in truth the surveyors return to England after
completing their assignment. Mason undertakes a second and final observation of the
Transit of Venus in 1769 (the closing section of the book is called "Last Transit"), this
time from northern Ireland, while Dixon makes observations from an island near the
North Cape.

Toward the end the surveyors' remorse about the Mason-Dixon Line emerges: it was not a
fitting monument to their careers, it was piecework for a corrupt organization (the Royal
Society), it denuded a wilderness that should not have been denuded, it created a division
between communities which would only come to cause harm. "Mason groans. 'Shall wise
Doctors one day write History's assessment of the Good resulting from this Line, vis-à-
vis the not-so-good? I wonder which List will be longer.'"

Then time runs out. Dixon's gout disables him. Mason's melancholy takes on a desperate
and irremediable hue. The last thirty pages of Mason & Dixon concern the indefinite state
of this twinned pair, of this fractious marriage, in twilight years. These pages are
evocative and terribly sad. Mortality has often been Pynchon's theme. As M&D
concludes with Mason's deluded insistence (after Dixon's death) upon taking his second
wife and family back to America, it becomes clear that the novel's attention to the
mechanisms and technologies of time and space finds its most poignant articulation in the
simple inevitability of death and decay. Pynchon seems to have learned even more about
these subjects as he has gotten older. It's hard not to read of Mason's passing, and of his
son's rhapsodic but sadly ironic depiction of an American continent in which "the Fish
jump into your Arms," without being both moved and remorseful about the dwindling
promise of our American enterprise -- which dwindling, in Mason & Dixon, begins at the
outset of the forcible colonization of our continent, at the very moment we survey this
land.

This is just the kind of truth that we often encounter in Pynchon: not simply what it
means, finally, to be American -- kith and kin of slaveholders and abolitionists, racists
and liberals, the powerful and the powerless, the dispossessed and the rapacious, the
oppressed and the oppressors -- but that the boundary lines that have been surveyed to
separate our American dichotomies, the boundaries of rhetoric and philosophy, are
arbitrary, tentative, unwritten in human nature. Pynchon's chthonic, powerfully symbolic
language in M&D gets us beneath the rhetoric of our pretensions to the raw, unconsoling
paradoxes of consciousness -- with all fancies and hallucinations and regrets intact. And
that's why artists as diverse as William Gibson, Don DeLillo, Laurie Anderson, Steve
Erickson, David Foster Wallace, James Cameron, Jonathan Franzen, and Salman Rushdie
seem to have schooled themselves in the Pynchon academy of myth and language. With
Mason & Dixon we're again in the generous hands of one of American literature's true
masters.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97jul/pynchon.htm

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